One Touch
by Systemic Anomaly
Summary: Gregory House can't stand Lisa Cuddy. But just sometimes, he remembers that he loves her.


**Title:** One Touch  
**Word Count:** 704  
**Rating:** PG-13  
**Summary:** Gregory House can't _stand_ Lisa Cuddy. But just sometimes, he remembers that he loves her.  
**Author's Notes:** Well. This single image -- the touch -- stays with me often enough for me to have wanted to write about it. I'd like to shout out Cincoflex with this one: as a fic writer, I will never match her for sheer intensity.

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Dr. Gregory House can't _stand_ Lisa Cuddy.

She infuriates him, like no one else has ever had the power to do, ever-present like a guilty conscience and always ready to cut him off, always a step ahead.

He _despises_ the way she makes him feel -- frustrated, horny, furious, like a teenager caught out after curfew and not at all like a world-famous diagnostician who _should_ have had administrators _fighting_ over who could pay him more. He hates the clinic, hates it like a dirty secret that he'd rather forget, hates the idiots and their idiotically boring ailments, hates the guy who comes in screaming that he's got colon cancer when all he needs is a smaller dildo and a more careful wife, hates that he's been reduced to this, hates that _she_ reduces him to this.

He hates how she lives by the book, how everything is neat and tidy and _For the best interests of this hospital_ and how he cannot, _cannot_ rattle her. Cannot throw her off-guard, startle her into loose-tongued revelation or uncertainty like he can anyone else who's still breathing. He hates the deep red nail polish that she wears, that she can doll herself up with paint and lipstick and those infuriatingly low-cut blouses and _still_ have power that he never will and never could.

He hates that she can pin him, like a bug skewered and flailing on black velvet, with a single wry burning gaze, can match him word for word and make him _crazy._

And he hates that she _knows_ that she does it.

But sometimes -- just sometimes, like the faintest whisper of a dream you've forgotten, that's never enough to remain after waking or to ever quite _change_ anything at all -- when he has a hand on the door, ready to cut a swath through the teeming masses in the corridors and hating her and the world in equal measure, or when she'd come into Exam Two just after Patient Number Six Hundred and Thirty-Eight, when he is angry and hungry and tired and _desperate_ for a reprieve...

...or when she sits next to his sprawled lanky form, sleek and heaving and naked in her bed, perhaps, or perhaps just when she pauses beside him in mid-tirade, his feet up on his desk in those adolescent red sneakers and his attention on anything _but_ her words... just _sometimes,_ Lisa Cuddy will rest a small, firm hand on his undamaged thigh, so warm through the faded denim of his jeans, or so _soft,_ on his tired bare skin.

Just the one gesture; just that single action. They never touch, in the office, never kiss or cling like lovers; never sneak a furtive grope when no one else is looking. He never stops canting his head to squint at her blouse as he rummages sulkily through the latest file, never stops leering at her cleavage. Why would he?

And she never softens to him. Never gives in, never reacts as if she were anything other than exactly what she was: Dean of Medicine, Big Bad Boss, powerful, driven administrator to whom everything has its place... including Gregory House. It is her hospital, after all, her ship, and weakness from Lisa Cuddy is not something either of them can afford. And neither of them can afford the whispers, the gossip, neither one of them can afford to be anything other than what they are to everyone _else._

There's simply too much at stake.

But just sometimes: the hand on his thigh, and it stills him.

His stomach loosens, and warms, his breath sighs out in one long, slow exhalation and whatever he happens to be saying stops cold, coming instead as some small contented sound from the back of his throat. Something coils in his loins and the tension leaves his trembling shoulders, and when she takes the hand away five seconds later he remembers that he loves her.

Not much, just that single touch.

But it's enough.

It has to be.


End file.
